crème de la crème

Jai Ganesh · 2019-07-05 00:14:27

542) Coenraad Johannes van Houten

Coenraad Johannes van Houten (15 March 1801, Amsterdam – 27 May 1887, Weesp) was a Dutch chemist and chocolate maker known for the treatment of cocoa mass with alkaline salts to remove the bitter taste and make cocoa solids more water-soluble; the resulting product is still called "Dutch process chocolate". He is also credited with introducing a method for pressing the fat (cocoa butter) from roasted cocoa beans, though this was in fact his father, Casparus van Houten's invention.

Father and son van Houten

Coenraad van Houten was the son of Casparus van Houten (1770–1858) and Arnoldina Koster. His father opened a chocolate factory in Amsterdam in 1815, with a mill turned by laborers. At that time, cocoa beans were ground into a fine mass, which could then be mixed with milk to create a chocolate drink or, with addition of sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla, made into cookies.

Cocoa press

In 1828 Casparus van Houten Sr. (and not his son, who is usually credited) patented an inexpensive method for pressing the fat from roasted cocoa beans. The center of the bean, known as the "nib", contains an average of 54 percent cocoa butter, which is a natural fat. Van Houten's machine – a hydraulic press – reduced the cocoa butter content by nearly half. This created a "cake" that could be pulverized into cocoa powder, which was to become the basis of all chocolate products.
The introduction of cocoa powder not only made creating chocolate drinks much easier, but also made it possible to combine the powder with sugar and then remix it with cocoa butter to create a solid, already closely resembling today's eating chocolate.

In 1838 the patent expired, enabling others to produce cocoa powder and build on Van Houten's success, experimenting to make new chocolate products. In 1847 English chocolate maker J. S. Fry & Sons produced arguably the first chocolate bar. Later developments were in Switzerland, where Daniel Peter introduced milk chocolate in 1875 and Rodolphe Lindtmade chocolate more blendable by the process of conching in 1879.

Dutch process chocolate

Coenraad Van Houten introduced a further improvement by treating the powder with alkaline salts (potassium or sodium carbonates) so that the powder would mix more easily with water. Today, this process is known as "Dutching". The final product, Dutch chocolate, has a dark color and a mild taste.

Later career

In 1835 Coenraad van Houten married Hermina van Houten (unrelated) from Groningen. In 1850 he moved his production from a windmill in Leiden to a steam factory in Weesp. By that time he was exporting chocolate to England, France, and Germany. In 1866 John Cadbury traveled to Weesp to buy a Van Houten press, but didn't use it in his manufacturing until 1875.

Coenraad's son Casparus Johannes (1844–1901), employed since 1865, had a gift for marketing and contributed greatly to the growth of the company. Advertisements for Van Houten could be found on trams throughout Europe and the United States. As early as 1899 Van Houten produced a commercial film that depicted a sleepy clerk who recovers miraculously after eating some chocolate. The factory was a boost for the town of Weesp, whose population doubled in the second half of the 19th century. Casparus Jr. had himself built a 99-room Jugendstil villa in Weesp, by the renowned architect A. Salm (1857–1915). Work was started in 1897 but not completed until 1901, the year he died.

The Van Houten company was sold in 1962 to W.R. Grace, and the factories in Weesp closed in 1971. The Van Houten brand name, still in use, has been transferred several times since, in 1990 from the German chocolate manufacturer Jacobs Suchard to Philip Morris. It subsequently was owned by the Stollwerck chocolate manufacturing company and since 2002 by Barry Callebaut.

The legacy of Dutch process cocoa

Dutch process cocoa is generally acknowledged as superior to cocoa not processed in this way. The combination of the inventions by father and son van Houten led to the nineteenth-century mass production and consumption of chocolate, or, as some call it, the "democratization" of chocolate.

Popular culture

"Drink Van Houten's Cocoa!" wrote Vladimir Mayakovsky in his poem, A Cloud in Trousers. This infamous citation is the title of Ornela Vorpsi's book from 2010.
A Van Houten's Cocoa shop can be seen during the opening battle sequence of Neil Jordan's 1996 film ‘Michael Collins.’

Jai Ganesh · 2019-07-07 01:11:43

543) Mária Telkes

Mária Telkes, (born December 12, 1900, Budapest, Austria-Hungary [now in Hungary]—died December 2, 1995, Budapest), Hungarian-born American physical chemist and biophysicist best known for her invention of the solar distiller and the first solar-powered heating system designed for residences. She also invented other devices capable of storing energy captured from sunlight.

Telkes, daughter of Aladar Telkes and Maria Laban de Telkes, was raised in Budapest. She studied physical chemistry at the University of Budapest, graduating with a B.A. in 1920 and a Ph.D. in 1924. She became an instructor at the institution in 1924 but decided to immigrate to the United States after visiting a relative, who served at the time as the Hungarian consul in Cleveland. In 1925 she accepted a position as a biophysicist for the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, where she worked with American surgeon George Washington Crile to create a photoelectric device that recorded brain waves.

Telkes became an American citizen in 1937. That same year she became a research engineer at Westinghouse Electric, where she developed instruments that converted heat into electrical energy; however, she made her first forays into solar energy research in 1939. That year, as part of the Solar Energy Conversion Project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), she worked on thermoelectric devices powered by sunlight. Telkes was assigned to the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, and it was there that she created one of her most important inventions: a solar distiller capable of vaporizing seawater and recondensing it into drinkable water. Although the system was carried aboard life rafts during the war, it was also scaled up to supplement the water demands of the Virgin Islands. She remained at MIT after the war, becoming an associate research professor in metallurgy in 1945.

Until the end of her career, Telkes continued to develop solar-energy applications and received several patents for her work. Together with American architect Eleanor Raymond, she designed and constructed the world’s first modern residence heated with solar energy. The house was built in Dover, Massachusetts, in 1948. Boxlike solar collectors captured sunlight and warmed the air in a compartment between a double layer of glass and a black sheet of metal. Warmed air was then piped into the walls, where it transferred heat to Glauber’s salts (crystallized sodium sulfate) for storage and later use. She improved upon existing heat-exchanger technology to create solar stoves and solar heaters, receiving a $45,000 grant from the Ford Foundation in 1953 to create a universal solar oven that could be adapted for use by people living at all latitudes. She also worked to develop materials capable of enduring the temperature extremes of space. In 1980 she assisted the U.S. Department of Energy in the development of the world’s first solar-electric residence, which was built in Carlisle, Massachusetts.

In 1952, Telkes became the first recipient of the Society of Women Engineers Achievement Award. In 1977 she received a lifetime achievement award from the National Academy of Sciences Building Research Advisory Board for her contributions to solar-heated building technology and the Charles Greeley Abbot Award from the American Solar Energy Society.

Jai Ganesh · 2019-07-09 01:36:14

544) Amos E. Joel Jr.

Amos Edward Joel Jr. (March 12, 1918 – October 25, 2008) was an American electrical engineer, known for several contributions and over seventy patents related to telecommunications switching systems.

Biography

Joel was born in Philadelphia, and spent portions of his youth living in New York City, where he graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx.

He earned his B.Sc. (1940) and M.Sc. (1942) in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked on the Rockefeller Differential Analyzer (project headed by Vannevar Bush), and a thesis on functional design of relays and switch circuits, advised by Samuel H. Caldwell. Joel worked at Bell Labs (1940–83) where he first undertook cryptology studies (collaboration with Claude Shannon), followed by studies on electronic switching system that resulted in the 1ESS switch (1948–60). He then headed the development of advanced telephone services (1961–68), which led to several patents, including one on Traffic Service Position System and a mechanism for handoff in cellular communication (1972). The latter invention made mobile telephony widely available by allowing a multitude of callers to use the limited number of available frequencies simultaneously and by allowing the seamless switching of calls from tower to tower as callers traveled. After 1983, he worked as a consultant to AT&T, developing mechanisms for optical switching.

Joel died in his home in Maplewood, New Jersey on October 25, 2008, at age 90.

Edward Joel Amos Jr. could be the inventor of the century. He invented the cellphone (Mobile communication system, US 3663762 A) in 1970.

Abstract

The invention provided for a high capacity cellular mobile communication system arranged to establish and maintain continuity of communication paths to mobile stations passing from the coverage of one radio transmitter into the coverage of another radio transmitter. A control center determines mobile station locations and enables a switching center to control dual access trunk circuitry to transfer an existing mobile station communication path from a formerly occupied cell to a new cell location. The switching center subsequently enables the dual access trunk to release the call connection to the formerly occupied cell.

Summary of the Invention

In the exemplary embodiment an electronic data processor is incorporated into a mobile communications system comprising a plurality of base stations each located in individual cell areas. The system is arranged to locate mobile stations in any cell area and to establish communication paths between located mobile stations and between located mobile stations and fixed stations. Apparatus is provided to establish and maintain a record of communication links serving located mobile stations. Additional apparatus is provided to periodically interrogate predetermined cell areas to detect the movement of located mobile stations into new cell areas. Apparatus is also provided to establish and record identity of communication links to the new cell areas and to reassign existing communication paths to new communication links while maintaining continuity of communication service.

In accordance with one feature of my invention directional antenna apparatus is provided in each cell area to locate mobile stations within particular cell areas.

Another feature of my invention is the provision of a stored program electronic data processor to assimilate location information, assign communication links, and process service requests for mobile stations located in a plurality of cell areas.

Another feature of my invention is the provision of switching apparatus wherein communication paths may be established between located mobile stations and between located mobile stations and fixed stations connected to the telephone direct distance dialing network.

In accordance with still another feature of my invention dual access switching apparatus is provided wherein communication paths established over communication links to certain cell areas may be switched onto communication links to other cell areas while maintaining continuity of communications between roaming mobile stations.

Jai Ganesh · 2019-07-11 01:20:09

545) Tom Parry Jones

Thomas "Tom" Parry Jones OBE (27 March 1935 – 11 January 2013) was a Welsh scientist, inventor and entrepreneur, who was responsible for developing and marketing the first handheld electronic breathalyser, winning the Queen's Award for Technological Achievement in 1980 for the work. Born and raised on Anglesey, he attended Bangor University and went on to study for his doctorate at University of Alberta, Canada. Prior to his work on the breathalyser at Lion Laboratories, he was a lecturer at the Royal Military College of Science and the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology. He established the Dr Tom Parry Jones Endowment Fund at Bangor University in 2002. After selling Lion Laboratories in 2005, he set up PPM Technology and Welsh Dragon Aviation. A trust was set up in his, and his wife's, names. The Tom and Raj Jones Trust promotes work by young entrepreneurs.

Early life, education and early career

Parry Jones was born on 27 March 1935 at Carreglefn, near Amlwch, Anglesey, North Wales, the son of a farmer. He was a native Welsh language speaker, which he used as a first language. Parry Jones attended the primary school at Carreglefn and the Ysgol Syr Thomas Jones comprehensive school at Amlwch. He studied chemistry at Bangor University, graduating in 1958, and then took a doctorate at the University of Alberta, Canada.

Following his doctorate, Parry Jones appointed as a lecturer at the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham, Oxfordshire. In 1964, he moved to the University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology (UWIST) at Cardiff.

Lion Laboratories

In 1967, Parry Jones established Lion Laboratories in Cardiff, with his colleague and Managing Director William "Bill" Ducie, an electrical engineer. The Road Safety Act 1967 introduced the first legally enforceable maximum blood alcohol level for drivers in the UK, above which it became an offence to be in charge of a motor vehicle; and introduced the roadside breathalyser, made available to police forces across the country.

In 1969, Lion Laboratories' version of the breathalyser, known as the Alcolyser, and incorporating crystal-filled tubes that changed colour (yellow to green) above a certain level of alcohol in the breath. Parry Jones continued to work at the University at this time, until in 1975 when he asked for a two-year leave of absence in order to investigate the commercial possibilities of the device. During 1976 he informed the University that he would not be returning. Lion Laboratories won the Queen's Award for Technological Achievement in 1980 for development of the first hand-held electronic breath-alcohol instrument (Alcolmeter), and this device was later marketed worldwide. Alcohol in the breath was analysed by an electrochemical [fuel cell] sensor rather than chemical crystals, providing a more reliable kerbside screening test for alcohol influence. A positive test was then complemented by sampling blood or urine for analysis at a forensic laboratory.

In 1983 breath-alcohol analysis was accepted for evidential purposes and Lion Intoximeter 3000 was the first instrument approved by the British Home Office for testing drunken drivers. More recently, a much more sophisticated breath-alcohol analyzer, the Lion Intoxilyzer 6000 is now used by the UK police for evidential purposes. In 1991, Lion Laboratories was sold to the American company MPD, Inc.. Parry Jones later said, "I found inventing the device the easy part. But producing it, developing it and selling it was the challenge.”

Other activities

Parry Jones later set up PPM Technology, a company manufacturing instruments for monitoring toxic gases. Through PPM, he supported chemistry students at Bangor University. He also established a small air charter company, Welsh Dragon Aviation, in which he flew return charter flights for passengers from Mona Airport to Cardiff in a Cessna 340. For more than two decades, Parry Jones was a trustee of the Engineering Education Scheme for Wales; a student of the year award is given out annually by the organisation. In 2005, he was named a fellow of Bangor University.

Endowment Fund

In about 2002, he established the Dr Tom Parry Jones Endowment Fund, at Bangor University, to encourage young people to develop careers and entrepreneurship in science and technology. The fund supports an annual Bangor Science Festival. He was also chairman of the Welsh Centre for International Affairs; and a trustee of the Engineering Education Scheme for Wales.

Personal life

With his ex-wife Jean, he had a son, Gareth and two daughters Diane and Sara. Parry Jones was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1986. He was inducted into the Gorsedd in 1997.

Death

On 11 January 2013, Parry Jones died at Llandudno General Hospital, aged 77, following a short illness. Following his death, Bangor University released a statement which read "Dr Tom Parry Jones' worldwide reputation and genuine enthusiasm for developing Wales' future economy through ensuring that young people are well supported in developing their scientific knowledge and entrepreneurial skills - made him a treasured alumnus of Bangor University.". A memorial service was held at Capel Mawr, Llangristiolus, which was followed a day later by his cremation at Bangor Crematorium. He was survived by his wife, children and mother.

A plaque honouring Parry Jones was unveiled by his wife, Raj, at the Llangefni police station in November 2013. The Tom and Raj Jones Trust was set up which promotes young entrepreneurs. The inaugural Tom Parry Jones Memorial Lecture was given in 2014 at Bangor University by First Minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones. It was entitled "A Breathtaking Legacy of an Inventor, Entrepreneur & Philanthropist", and Jones said "I am very pleased to be able to be part of the inaugural Tom Parry Jones Memorial Lecture and, in doing so, to further honour such an outstanding role model for researchers, entrepreneurs and philanthropists across Wales and far beyond". Coinciding with that lecture, the Jones o Gymru Crisp company released a sweet chilli crisp dedicated to Parry Jones' achievements, which raised money for the Trust.

Jai Ganesh · 2019-07-14 00:34:06

546) Vinton Cerf

Vinton Cerf, in full Vinton Gray Cerf, (born June 23, 1943, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.), American computer scientist who is considered one of the founders, along with Robert Kahn, of the Internet. In 2004 both Cerf and Kahn won the A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for their “pioneering work on internetworking, including the design and implementation of the Internet’s basic communications protocols, TCP/IP, and for inspired leadership in networking.”

In 1965 Cerf received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Stanford University in California. He then worked for IBM as a systems engineer before attending the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where he earned a master’s degree and then a doctorate in computer science in 1970 and 1972, respectively. He then returned to Stanford, where he joined the faculty in computer science and electrical engineering.

While at UCLA, Cerf worked under fellow student Stephen Crocker in the laboratory of Leonard Kleinrock on the project to write the communication protocol (Network Control Program [or Protocol]; NCP) for the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network; see DARPA), the first computer network based on packet switching, a heretofore untested technology. (In contrast to ordinary telephone communications, in which a specific circuit must be dedicated to the transmission, packet switching splits a message into “packets” that travel independently over many different circuits.) UCLA was among the four original ARPANET nodes. Cerf also worked on the software that measured and tested the performance of the ARPANET. While working on the protocol, Cerf met Kahn, an electrical engineer who was then a senior scientist at Bolt Beranek & Newman. Cerf’s professional relationship with Kahn was among the most important of his career.

In 1972 Kahn moved to DARPA as a program manager in the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), where he began to envision a network of packet-switching networks—essentially, what would become the Internet. In 1973 Kahn approached Cerf, then a professor at Stanford, to assist him in designing this new network. Cerf and Kahn soon worked out a preliminary version of what they called the ARPA Internet, the details of which they published as a joint paper in 1974. Cerf joined Kahn at IPTO in 1976 to manage the office’s networking projects. Together, with many contributing colleagues sponsored by DARPA, they produced TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), an electronic transmission protocol that separated packet error checking (TCP) from issues related to domains and destinations (IP).

Cerf’s work on making the Internet a publicly accessible medium continued after he left DARPA in 1982 to become a vice president at MCI Communications Corporation (WorldCom, Inc., from 1998 to 2003). While at MCI he led the effort to develop and deploy MCI Mail, the first commercial e-mail service that was connected to the Internet. In 1986 Cerf became a vice president at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, a not-for-profit corporation located in Reston, Virginia, that Kahn, as president, had formed to develop network-based information technologies for the public good. Cerf also served as founding president of the Internet Society from 1992 to 1995. In 1994 Cerf returned to MCI as a senior vice president, and from 2000 to 2007 he served as chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the group that oversees the Internet’s growth and expansion. In 2005 he left MCI to become vice president and “chief Internet evangelist” at the search engine company Google Inc.

In addition to his work on the Internet, Cerf served on many government panels related to cybersecurity and the national information infrastructure. A fan of science fiction, he was a technical consultant to one of author Gene Roddenberry’s posthumous television projects, Earth: Final Conflict. Among his many honours were the U.S. National Academy of Engineering’s Charles Stark Draper Prize (2001), the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research (2002), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2005), the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (2013), and the French Legion of Honour (2014).

Jai Ganesh · 2019-07-16 01:15:14

547) Anatol Josepho

Anatol Marco Josepho (March 31, 1894 – December 16, 1980), born Anatol Josephewitz, was a Jewish Siberian immigrant to the United States from Omsk, Russia, who invented and patented the first automated photo booth in 1925, which was named the "Photomaton". In 1927, he was paid one million dollars for the invention.

Biography

Josepho's father was a wealthy jeweler and his mother died when he was three years old. He developed a close bond with his father and became interested in the Wild West cultural phenomenon of expansion in the United States in the late 1800s. He began taking photographs with a Brownie camera produced by the Eastman Kodak Company during his childhood and he attended a local technical institute to pursue his growing interest in photography in 1909 at the age of 15. Anatol fled his home country of Siberia after the 1917 Russian Revolution. He moved to China, opening a photo studio in Shanghai, then to the United States. In the early 1920s, he worked in New York to develop the Photomaton. In July 1926, he met and married Ganna Belle Kehlmann (January 10, 1904 – October 19, 1978). The two were friends with their neighbor, performer Will Rogers and his wife Betty Blake. They had two children, both boys. He died on December 16, 1980 at the age of 86 in a rest home in La Jolla from a series of strokes.

The Photomaton

Josepho's invention of the photo booth, known as the "Photomaton", debuted in September 1925 at 1659 Broadway Street in Manhattan, located in the heart of New York City. The Photomaton charged twenty-five cents for a strip of eight photos that were developed in eight minutes. The automation was achieved in a room that synchronized a coin controlled camera that featured a single source of diffuse light. White-gloved attendants stayed by the machine during hours of operation to control the crowds as well as to provide maintenance for the machine. Around 280,000 customers, for instance, waited the eight-minute process as reported by Time magazine in April 1927. The Photomaton Company was created to place Photomaton machines all over the country. Future President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a member of the board of directors. In 1928, Josepho sold the rights to the machine to Henry Morgenthau, Sr. for $1,000,000, equivalent to $14,591,085 in 2018. In an interview with The New York Times, Morgenthau said that the machine will allow them "to do in the photographic field what Woolworths has done in novelties and merchandise, Ford in automobiles". The following year, the machine was introduced to the European market with notable figures such as André Breton and Salvador Dalí had their portraits taken.

Legacy

Camp Josepho, a 110-acre property, which stretches from Mandeville Canyon to Will Rogers State Park, was given to the Boy Scouts of the Crescent Bay Council on July 7, 1941 by Anatol Josepho[11] Sixty-five years later, Camp Josepho under the Western Los Angeles County Council (WLACC) continues to fulfill its mission of serving youth throughout Los Angeles, with a unique emphasis on filmmaking, shooting sports, and computer programming. Remnants of what once was Josepho's personal mansion can be found between the camp and Murphy Ranch.

Jai Ganesh · 2019-07-18 01:15:22

548) Samuel Face

Samuel Allen Face, Jr. (August 2, 1923 – May 2, 2001) was an American inventor and co-developer of some of the most important advances in concrete floor technology and wireless controls.

Early life

Face was born at the home of his maternal grandparents in City Point, Virginia. He attended Norfolk Public Schools and graduated from Matthew Fontaine Maury High School, the Norfolk Division of William and Mary/VPI (now Old Dominion University) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His maternal grandfather, J. Fred Muhlig (1876–1948), also an MIT graduate, once worked as an engineer under Thomas Edison in West Orange, New Jersey.

After four years of employment as a marine engineer and naval architect at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, in 1951, this ninth generation resident of Hampton Roads joined the family of companies founded by his great-grandfather Edward Webster Face (1829–1907) in 1867.

Concrete Industry

Mr. Face was best known for his role in the 1970s, 80s and 90s in the development of the technologies and the design/installation practices that became the world standard for the specification, control and measurement of the flatness and levelness of concrete.

The Face Floor Profile Numbering System ("F-Numbers") has been adopted by the American Concrete Institute, the American Society for Testing and Materials, the Canadian Standards Association, the World Bank and is more widely used with each passing year. A system that is a slight modification of F-Numbers is used in much of Europe.

Sam Face's personal field consulting on construction projects in more than 20 countries helped create the modern industrial and commercial concrete floor. In the 1970s, working with Canada's top concrete contractor on numerous projects in greater Toronto, Mr. Face developed the placement and finishing practices that resulted in what he called "Superflat Floors," known to many at the time as "Sam Face floors." Superflat floors are now part of the standard lexicon of the concrete industry.

As of 2014, the consulting company he helped create had provided services on more than 8,000 projects on five continents.

The measuring instruments he co-invented have been used to measure billions of square feet of floors and roadways around the world and are specified by the United States Federal Highway Administration and the World Bank.

Over the last 20 years of Face's life, the use of the Face flat floor technologies and processes resulted in a 100% improvement in concrete floor flatness/levelness on the projects on which it was employed – usually at no additional cost to the building owner.

Face also designed and personally built a Superflat Grinder, which, according to the American Concrete Institute, produced the flattest concrete floor profiles ever measured.

Piezoelectric Technologies & Lightning Switch

Late in his life, Face became interested in piezoelectric technology, which led to his company's development of the Lightning Switch and other improvements and applications of piezoelectric actuators, generators and sensors... and Transoner transformers.

Achievements

Two of the technological innovations developed at The Face Companies under his leadership were recognized with NOVA Awards, the highest international honor for innovation in construction. Those innovations were Concrete Slab Flatness / F-Number System (1990) and The Lightning Switch Wireless Electric Switch (2006). As of 2017, no other company had been the sole developer of more than one NOVA-winning innovation.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration named The Lightning Switch one of the top 20 spin-off developments using a core NASA technology of the early 21st century.

His life's work and accomplishments were recognized by a special Joint Resolution of the Virginia General Assembly in 2002.

For his contributions to the concrete industry, Sam Face was named a fellow of the American Concrete Institute by a unanimous vote of the selection committee.

Face was listed as an inventor on 31 United States patents... ranging from a concrete mixer... to a precision measuring device... to a wireless switch.

Face also is recognized by an award given in his honor. The Golden Trowels are highly prized awards in the concrete flooring industry. Presented by The Face Companies, Golden Trowels recognize the flattest and most level floor slabs placed in the world in the previous contest year. The Golden Trowels are announced each year at The World of Concrete in Las Vegas. A special Golden Trowel, The "Sam" Award was established in 2002 to honor "outstanding accomplishments in and contributions to the art and science of high quality horizontal concrete construction."

Death at 77

Sam Face died of cancer in the family home in the Larchmont section of Norfolk, Virginia in 2001, the home where his grandfather Muhlig, who had worked with Edison, died in 1948. He was buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Norfolk.

Jai Ganesh · 2019-07-20 00:01:56

549) Waldemar Jungner

Ernst Waldemar Jungner (June 19, 1869 – August 30, 1924) was a Swedish inventor and engineer. In 1899 he invented the nickel-iron electric storage battery (NiFe), the nickel-cadmium battery (NiCd) and the rechargeable alkaline silver-cadmium battery (AgCd). As an inventor he also fabricated a fire alarm based on different dilutions of metals. He worked on the electrolytic production of sodium carbonate, and patented a rock drilling device.

Early life

Ernst Waldemar Jungner was born in 1869 in Västra Götaland County, Sweden. His parents were ministers, and his father died when Waldemar was 13 years old. In 1869, the year he was born, failed harvests caused famine throughout Sweden, which affected Jungner's health. He also contracted measles and scarlet fever.

Education

He attended Skara upper secondary school, and studied chemistry, mathematics, astronomy, botany, geology and Latin at Uppsala University. He went on to carry out further studies at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm.

Business

In 1900 he started the firm "Ackumulator Aktiebolaget Jungner". There was a long patent dispute with Edison which was won by Edison in the end because he had larger financial resources. This caused serious problems to Jungner's firm. The company managed to survive by using a slightly different name "Nya Ackumulator Aktiebolaget Jungner" in 1904. Jungner left the management of the company at this time, but remained a consultant to the new firm. This company was wound up in 1910, and a new company "Ackumulator Aktiebolaget Jungner" was created, which profitably used new technology developments. A descendant company "NiFe Junger" in 1991 became part of Saft Groupe S.A..

Battery use

Nickel-cadmium batteries were commonly used in the power systems of rockets and artificial satellites through the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in terrestrial portable electrical devices.

On the rescue mission to Umbreto Nobile and his companions on the North pole expedition in 1928, several batteries were dropped from an airplane to supply electricity to the radio of the expedition. Only the Jungner NiFe battery worked.

Later life

Jungner patented designs for a fuel cell in 1907. He carried out investigations into the production of cement, and the extraction of radium from ores. Jungner joined the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in 1922 and in 1924 he received the Swedish Chemical Society's Oscar Carlson Medal. Jungner died in 1924 of pneumonia at the age of 55.

Jai Ganesh · 2019-07-22 00:04:56

550) John Harvey Kellogg

John Harvey Kellogg, (born February 26, 1852, Tyrone, Michigan, U.S.—died December 14, 1943, Battle Creek, Michigan), American physician and health-food pioneer whose development of dry breakfast cereals was largely responsible for the creation of the flaked-cereal industry.

Kellogg received an M.D. from Bellevue Hospital Medical College, New York City, in 1875. A Seventh-day Adventist and vegetarian, Kellogg became superintendent in 1876 of the Seventh-day Adventist Western Health Reform Institute, which then became the Battle Creek Sanitarium, located in Battle Creek, Michigan. (The sanitarium was renamed the Percy Jones Army Hospital in 1942, the Battle Creek Federal Center in 1954, and Hart-Dole-Inouye Federal Center in 2003.) Kellogg developed numerous nut and vegetable products to vary the diet of the patients, including a flaked-wheat cereal called Granose and cornflakes. Although cornflakes were not new, they had never before been presented as a breakfast food. In 1898 Kellogg and his brother W.K. Kellogg founded the Battle Creek Sanitarium Health Food Company to handle the production of cornflakes and other foods for sanitarium patients. In 1906, after a dispute over the distribution of their cornflake cereal, W.K. Kellogg formed his own cereal company, the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company (later renamed Kellogg Company), and one of the sanitarium patients, C.W. Post, also founded a cereal company that became well known.

Kellogg was a cofounder of the Race Betterment Foundation, an organization that promoted eugenics and racial segregation. He also was founder and first president (1923–26) of Battle Creek College, and in 1931 he opened Miami–Battle Creek Sanitarium at Miami Springs, Florida. He was the author of numerous medical books.

Jai Ganesh · 2019-07-24 01:52:02

551) Ub Iwerks

Ub Iwerks, original name in full Ubbe Ert Iwwerks, (born March 24, 1901, Kansas City, Mo., U.S.—died July 7, 1971, Burbank, Calif.), American animator and special-effects technician who, among many other achievements, brought the world-renowned cartoon character Mickey Mouse to life.

Iwerks was the son of an immigrant German barber. When he was 18 years old, he met and befriended Walt Disney, a fellow employee at the Pesman-Rubin Commercial Art Studio in Kansas City. After an unsuccessful attempt to go into business for themselves in 1920, the two young artists went to work at the Kansas City Film Ad Company, which produced animated advertisements for local movie theatres. Iwerks and Disney complemented each other perfectly; Iwerks was a phenomenally fast and flexible artist, while Disney was a creative visionary with a remarkable talent for salesmanship.

After setting up his own Hollywood cartoon studio in 1923, Disney invited Iwerks to join the organization the following year. When the distributor of Disney’s popular Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon series raided Disney’s staff in 1927, only Iwerks remained loyal to his old Kansas City colleague. Forced to start over from scratch, the two men came up with a new cartoon character named Mickey Mouse. With Disney concentrating on gags and characterization and Iwerks handling the animation, the team scored a spectacular hit with their third Mickey Mouse film, the “all talkie” Steamboat Willie (1928). Despite his harmonious relationship with Disney, Iwerks aspired to become an independent producer. Launching his own animation studio in 1930, he supervised dozens of entries in the Flip the Frog, Willie Whopper, and ComiColor Cartoons series. During this period he made several significant contributions to the art of animation photography, notably the multiplane camera, which created a three-dimensional effect on screen.

Although Iwerks’s cartoons were artistically superb, they lacked the strong storylines and appealing characters that distinguished the Disney output. After closing his studio in 1936, Iwerks directed cartoons for other producers. In 1940 he returned to Disney’s studios, where he would remain until his death. Given carte blanche to work on the technical developments that had always been his first priority, he made enormous advances in the field of optical printing and matte photography, seamlessly combining animation with live action in such Disney releases as Mary Poppins (1964). He also helped develop a number of the attractions for Disney’s theme parks in California and Florida. Iwerks received Academy Awards for his technical achievements in 1960 and 1965 and an additional nomination for his special-effects work in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963).

Jai Ganesh · 2019-07-26 00:01:34

552) Igor Gorynin

Igor Vasilievich Gorynin (10 March 1926 – 9 May 2015) was a Russian metallurgist, creator of many new titanium and aluminium alloys, and reactor steels. He was the director of the Prometey Central Scientific Research Institute Of Structural Materials.

Biography

Igor Gorynin was born in Leningrad in 1926. He graduated from the Department of Metallurgy of the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute in 1949 After graduation he worked for a few months for the transformer plant in Zaporizhia (Zaporozhye Transformer Plant) then started to work for the Central Research Institute of Structural Materials ‘Prometey’. Since 1977 he has been the director of the Institute.

In 1957 he became a Candidate of Science for his works on plastic deformation on the properties for the high-strength steels for ship hulls.

In 1967 he became a Doctor of Science for his work on the construction materials for nuclear reactors. In 1971 he became a Professor, in 1979 he became a Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences and since 1984 a Full member of the Academy. In 1989 he was elected to Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union (from the Academy of Science) and took part in the historic dissolution of the USSR. He died at the age of 89 in Saint Petersburg in 2015.

Works

Gorynin wrote on doping of metallic alloy and its effects on plastic deformations and physical properties of the alloys. These works allowed him to create a number of alloys with unique properties. Among the most important Gorynin materials are weldable titanium alloys for machine building and shipbuilding. He also created high-strength aluminum alloys. These alloys are claimed to have the highest specific strength of all known weldable metallic materials.

Gorynin invented of the radiation hardened steels used for nautical and stationary nuclear reactors and other compositional and functional materials with special requirements. He was a leader of the World Association of Materials Science. He is the member of the RAS Bureau of the Department of Chemistry and Science of Materials, member of the Presidium of St. Petersburg RAS Scientific Center, the Chairman of the RAS Coordination Council on the problems of the studies and creation of structural materials for the thermonuclear reactors, the Chairman of the RAS National Committee on welding, the President of the Interregional Union of Scientific and Engineering Public Associations, the member of the International Organizational Committee of the World Titanium Congress, etc.

Awards

Igor Gorynin was awarded

• two orders of the Red Banner of Labour (1959, 1970);
• Lenin Prize (1963);
• USSR State Prize (1974);
• Order of Lenin (1981);
• Order of the October Revolution (1986);
• Russian Federation State Prize (1994 and 2006);
• Order of Merit for the Fatherland 2nd (2002) and 3rd (1996) class;
• Order of Saint Daniil of Moscow (1996);
• La Crus de Comendator al Merito Belgo-Hispanico) (1997);
• Alexei Krylov prize (2001);
• Dmitry Chernov's medal (2001)

gorynin-i.v..jpg

Jai Ganesh · 2019-07-28 00:11:36

553) Anders Knutsson Ångström

Anders Knutsson Ångström (1888, Stockholm – 1981) was a Swedish physicist and meteorologist who was known primarily for his contributions to the field of atmospheric radiation. However, his scientific interests encompassed many diverse topics.

He was the son of physicist Knut Ångström. He graduated with a BS from the University of Upsala in 1909. Then he completed his MS at the University of Upsala in 1911. He taught at the University of Stockholm Later, he was the department head of the Meteorology department at State Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) of Sweden 1945–1949 and SMHI's chancellor 1949–1954.

He is credited with the invention of the pyranometer, the first device to accurately measure direct and indirect solar radiation.
In 1962 he was awarded the International Meteorological Organization Prize by the World Meteorological Organization.

(A pyranometer is a type of actinometer used for measuring solar irradiance on a planar surface and it is designed to measure the solar radiation flux density (W/m2) from the hemisphere above within a wavelength range 0.3 μm to 3 μm. .

A typical pyranometer does not require any power to operate. However, recent technical development includes use of electronics in pyranometers, which do require (low) external power.)

anders-knutsson-ngstrm-196d86e7-7100-45c8-a947-90bd49f7c82-resize-750.jpeg

Jai Ganesh · 2019-07-30 00:31:24

554) Sir Alec John Jeffreys

1950-

British Geneticist

Sir Alec John Jeffreys developed a ground-breaking new technique to identify different genetic patterns found in each individual person, except identical twins. He coined the term DNA fingerprinting, and his procedure revolutionized criminal investigations by enabling forensic scientists to identify suspects based on scant DNA evidence found in blood, tissue, and body fluids.

Jeffreys was born on January 9, 1950, in Oxford, England. When he was eight years old his father, Sidney Victor Jeffreys, a designer and engineer in the car industry, gave him a microscope and chemistry set. He became hooked on both biology and chemistry, and found the two subjects fit together in biochemistry. In 1975 Jeffreys received a Ph.D. in human genetics from the University of Oxford and went to Amsterdam to work on a project. While in Amsterdam, an interesting question occurred to him: If genes can be detected in DNA, can inherited differences among people be detected in their genes? When this was later found to be possible, a new area of molecular genetics research was opened up.

Finding how bits of human DNA are different came unexpectedly while working on another project concerning genes and the course of evolution. Jeffreys noted the same genetic sequences are repeated over and over, an occurrence he called "stuttered DNA." There are different numbers of stutters between people. These stutters or variable numbers of tandem repeats (VNTRs) he found could be cut with restriction enzymes and then separated into fragments by a process called polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, or PAGE. The process uses agarose gel, a jelly-like material, in a device that creates an electrical field. The groups migrate according to size, creating a pattern that represents a distinct DNA fingerprint. The procedure is also called restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis (RFLP).

Jeffreys realized its potential for solving problems of identification. His first opportunity to use DNA fingerprinting occurred in March 1985, when he proved a boy was the son of a British citizen, allowing him to enter the country.

The first case of human DNA used in crime detection occurred the next year. A teenage girl was raped and strangled in a village near Jeffreys's laboratory in Leicester. Body fluids were recovered, but no suspect was found. Three years later it happened again. Another teenage girl was strangled in the same way as the first. A 19-year-old caterer confessed to the second murder but not to the first. However, the DNA evidence from both murders was the same. The man had falsely confessed to the murder of the second girl. The DNA evidence did eventually reveal the real killer when blood samples from 4582 village men were taken.

DNA evidence was first used in an American court to convict Tommy Lee Andrews of a Florida math. The use of DNA evidence in criminal investigations soon spread worldwide.

In 1988 Kary Mullis (1944- ) discovered polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a technique that allows small amounts of DNA to be copied or amplified in test tubes. In 1990 Jeffreys used DNA analysis, with the help of PCR, to identify the skeletal remains of Joseph Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor who performed barbaric experiments on Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz.

The technique developed by Jeffreys has been refined to identify small sequences called short tandem repeats (STRs). One of the most famous cases involving the use of DNA was the O.J. Simpson investigation in 1995. Jeffreys's work has provided an important tool for solving crimes.

Jeffreys teaches human genetics at the University of Leicester and has shifted his research focus to the study of DNA mutations from one generation to the next. He is especially interested in the effects of environment on DNA, including the genetic consequences of the Russian nuclear power plant accident in Chernobyl.

In 1994 Jeffreys was knighted by the Queen for his research in genetics and his contribution to the field of forensic DNA. He has received over 30 honors and prizes for his work.

JEF00001-Alec-Jeffreys.jpg?width=275

Jai Ganesh · 2019-08-01 03:03:00

555) Andrew Kay

Andrew F. Kay (January 22, 1919 – August 28, 2014) was a businessman and innovator. He was President and CEO of Kaypro, a personal computer company, which at one time was the world’s fourth largest manufacturer of computers, and the largest in the world in sales of portable computers.

Kay, a 1940 graduate of MIT, started his career with Bendix followed by two years at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 1952, Kay founded Non-Linear Systems, a manufacturer of digital instrumentation. NLS developed a reputation for providing rugged durability in critical applications for everything from submarines to spacecraft. At NLS he invented the digital voltmeter, in 1954.

Kaypro began selling computers in the early 1980s. In 1985, it had more than $120 million in revenues, dwarfing what had been its parent, NLS. But the company's success was relatively short-lived; in 1990 it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and it was liquidated in 1992.

In the late 1990s, Kay founded Kay Computers, which similarly manufactured and sold personal computers. The company lasted for less than ten years.

Kay later was a Senior Business Advisor to Accelerated Composites, LLC.

He co-founded the Rotary Club of Del Mar, California.

Jai Ganesh · 2019-08-03 00:07:51

556) Konstantin Khrenov

Konstantin Konstantinovich Khrenov (13 February 1894 – 12 October 1984) was a Soviet engineer and inventor who in 1932 introduced underwater welding and cutting of metals. For this method, extensively used by the Soviet Navy during World War II, Khrenov was awarded the State Stalin Prize in 1946.

Biography

Khrenov was born in 1894 in Borovsk, a town in Kaluga Oblast, Russia, located just south from its border with the Moscow Oblast. In 1918, he graduated from the department of electrochemistry of Saint Petersburg State Electrotechnical University (ETU). After graduation, he continued his research at ETU and worked there as a lecturer between 1921 and 1925. He then moved to Moscow and between 1928 and 1947 was teaching at the Moscow Institute of Electromechanical Engineering (Railway Transport); in 1933 he became a professor there. In parallel, between 1931 and 1947 Khrenov was teaching at the Bauman Moscow State Technical University – one of the oldest and largest Russian technical universities.

In the 1940s, Khrenov moved to Ukraine where he assumed professor positions at the following institutions:
• 1945–48 – Institute of Electric Welding
• 1948–1952 – Institute of Structural Mechanics
• 1952–1963 – Institute of Electrical Engineering
• 1947–1958 – Kiev Polytechnic Institute
• 1963–till retirement – Institute of Electric Welding.

Achievements

Khrenov dedicated his entire career to the development of welding techniques and equipment. He invented methods of electric welding and cutting metals under water, designed power sources for arc and spot welding, ceramic fluxes, electrode coatings, methods of cold pressure welding, diffusion welding, plasma cutting and many others. His breakthrough achievement was development of the electrodes for underwater welding in 1932. Their successful test at the Black Sea in the same year was the first practical realization of underwater welding. In this method, the gas bubbles formed as a result of welding reactions were generating a stable flow which shielded the arc from water. Underwater welding had quickly found practical application and already in 1936–1938 was used in the lifting of the ship ‘Boris’ sunk in the Black Sea, as well as in the repair of bridges and other ships, especially during World War II.

Awards

For his pioneering work in underwater welding, Khrenov was awarded the State Stalin Prize in 1946. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1945 and 1953, respectively. His lifetime achievements were later acknowledged by the Council of Ministers (Soviet Union) Prize (1982), and USSR State Prize (1986, posthumously). His other decorations include Order of Lenin, Order of the October Revolution and several other lesser orders.

Jai Ganesh · 2019-08-05 00:26:44

557) Jack Kilby

Jack Kilby, in full Jack St. Clair Kilby, (born Nov. 8, 1923, Jefferson City, Mo., U.S.—died June 20, 2005, Dallas, Texas), American engineer and one of the inventors of the integrated circuit, a system of interconnected transistors on a single microchip. In 2000 Kilby was a corecipient, with Herbert Kroemerand Zhores Alferov, of the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Education And Early Career

Kilby was the son of an electrical engineer and, like many inventors of his era, got his start in electronics with amateur radio. His interest began while he was in high school when the Kansas Power Company of Great Bend, Kansas, of which his father was president, had to rely on amateur radio operators for communications after an ice storm disrupted normal service. After serving as an electronics technician in the U.S. Army during World War II, Kilby enrolled in the electrical engineering program at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (B.S.E.E., 1947).

After graduation Kilby joined the Centralab Division of Globe Union, Inc., located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he was placed in charge of designing and developing miniaturized electronic circuits. He also found time to continue his studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Extension Division (M.S.E.E., 1950). In 1952 Centralab sent Kilby to Bell Laboratories’ headquarters in Murray Hill, New Jersey, to learn about the transistor, which had been invented at Bell in 1947 and which Centralab had purchased a license to manufacture. Back at Centralab, Kilby began working on germanium-based transistors for use in hearing aids. He soon realized, however, that he needed the resources of a larger company to pursue the goal of miniaturizing circuits, and in 1958 he switched to another Bell licensee, Texas Instruments Incorporated of Dallas, Texas.

Career At Texas Instruments

Shortly after his arrival at Texas Instruments (TI), Kilby had his epoch-making “monolithic idea.” Kilby realized that, instead of connecting separate components, an entire electronic assembly could be made as one unit from one semiconducting material by overlaying it with various impurities to replicate individual electronic components, such as resistors, capacitors, and transistors. Soon Kilby had a working postage-stamp-size prototype manufactured from germanium, and in February 1959 TI filed a patent application for this “miniaturized electronic circuit”—the world’s first integrated circuit. Four months later, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation filed a patent application for essentially the same device, but based on a different manufacturing procedure. Ten years later, long after their respective companies had cross-licensed technologies, the courts gave Kilby credit for the idea of the integrated circuit but gave Noyce the patent for his planar manufacturing process, a method for evaporating lines of conductive metal (the “wires”) directly onto a silicon chip.

Although the original integrated circuit (IC) was Kilby’s most important invention, it was only one of more than 50 patents that he was awarded. Many of those patents concerned improvements in IC design and manufacturing, including those for the first IC-powered experimental computer that TI built for the U.S. Air Force in 1961 and for the ICs that TI designed and delivered to the Air Force in 1962 for use in the Minuteman ballistic missile guidance system. In 1965 Kilby invented the semiconductor-based thermal printer. In 1967 he designed the first IC-based electronic calculator, the Pocketronic, gaining himself and TI the basic patent that lies at the heart of all pocket calculators. The Pocketronic required dozens of ICs, making it too complicated and expensive to manufacture for consumers, but by 1972 TI had reduced the number of necessary ICs to one. The introduction in that year of the TI Datamath pocket calculator marked the beginning of the IC’s integration into the very fabric of everyday life. By 1976 the pocket calculator had made the slide rule a museum piece.

Honours And Awards

Kilby began a leave of absence from TI in 1970 to pursue independent research, particularly in solar power generation, although he continued as a semiconductor consultant on a part-time basis. He also served (1978–84) as a professor of electrical engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station. Among his many honours, Kilby was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1969, the Charles Stark Draper Medal in 1989, and the National Medal of Technology in 1990. In 1997 TI dedicated its new research and development building in Dallas, the Kilby Center. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, breaking with a trend of recognizing only theoretical physicists, awarded half of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Physics to Kilby for his work as an applied physicist.

Jai Ganesh · 2019-08-07 00:02:14

558) Steve Kirsch

Steven Todd Kirsch (born December 24, 1956) is an American serial entrepreneur who has started seven companies: Mouse Systems, Frame Technology Corp., Infoseek, Propel, Abaca, OneID, and Token. He invented and patented an early version of the optical mouse. In 2007, his personal fortune was estimated at $230 million, the majority earned from the IPO of Infoseek and the acquisition of Frame Technology.

Career

Kirsch has a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Steven Kirsch founded Mouse Systems Corporation in 1982. After he left the company, he co-founded Frame Technology Corp. in 1986 to market the FrameMaker publishing software. After Frame was acquired by Adobe Systems for $500 million, he founded a Web portalcompany, Infoseek Corporation, in 1994. After Infoseek was acquired by The Walt Disney Company, he founded Propel Software Corporation in 1999.

He set up a $75 million charitable fund and became a philanthropist. In 2003, Hillary Clinton presented Kirsch with a National Caring Award from the Caring Institute in Washington, D.C. The award celebrates those special individuals who, in transcending self, devote their lives in service to others, especially the disadvantaged, the poor, the disabled and the dying. In 2005 he founded Abaca, which made a spam filter (99.99% accurate according to two reviews). Abaca was acquired by Proofpoint, Inc. in 2013.

On August 11, 2007, Kirsch announced on his personal Web site that he had been diagnosed with Waldenstrom's macroglobulinemia, a rare blood cancer. His cancer was shrinking as a result of treatment using an experimental HDAC inhibitor, LBH-589.

In September 2011, he started OneID which is creating a user-centric Internet-scale digital identity system that uses public key cryptography to replace usernames and passwords with a single, stable, secure, digital identity that preserves privacy and is compatible with the NSTIC goals. The technology was used by Salsa Labs in 2013, to increase the frequency and security of online donations.

Jai Ganesh · 2019-08-09 00:21:49

559) Jens William Ægidius Elling

Jens William Ægidius Elling (also Aegidus or Aegidius) (26 July 1861 – 27 May 1949) was a Norwegian researcher, inventor and pioneer of gas turbine who is considered to be the father of the gas turbine. He built the first gas turbine that was able to produce more power than needed to run its own components.

Elling was born in and grew up in Oslo, Norway. He studied mechanical engineering at Kristiania Technical College, (now part of Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences) graduating in 1881. Between 1885-1902, he worked as an engineer and designer at a number of workshops in Sweden and Norway.

His first gas turbine patent was granted in 1884. In 1903 he completed the first turbine that produced excess power; his original machine used both rotary compressors and turbines to produce 11 bhp (8 kW; 11 PS) net. He further developed the concept, and by 1912 he had developed a gas turbine system with separate turbine unit and compressor in series, a combination that is now common.

One major challenge was to find materials that could withstand the high temperatures developed in the turbine to achieve high output powers. His 1903 turbine could withstand inlet temperatures up to 400° Celsius (752° F). Elling understood that if better materials could be found, the gas turbine would be an ideal power source for airplanes. Many years later, Sir Frank Whittle, building on the early work of Elling, managed to build a practical gas turbine engine for an airplane, the jet engine. Ellings gas turbine prototypes from 1903 and 1912 are exhibited at Norsk Teknisk Museum in Oslo.

Elling also did significant development work in other areas, such as steam engine controls, pumps, compressors, vacuum drying et cetera.

In 1914 Elling produced a book called ‘Billig opvarmning: veiledning i at behandle magasinovner økonomisk og letvint’. (English: Cheap Heating: Guidance for the simple and economical treatment of base burners), which was published by Aschehoug. Books written by Elling are now rare, and are mostly found in museums and libraries.

Jai Ganesh · 2019-08-11 00:19:37

560) Ken Kutaragi

Ken Kutaragi (born August 2, 1950) is the former chairman and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment(SCEI), the video game division of Sony Corporation, and current president and CEO of Cyber AI Entertainment. He is known as "The Father of the PlayStation", and its successors and spinoffs, including the PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, the PlayStation 3, and the PlayStation 4.

He had also designed the sound processor for the Super NES. With Sony, he designed the VLSI chip which works in conjunction with the PS1's RISC CPU to handle the graphics rendering. Kutaragi was closely watched by financial analysts who trace profiles of the losses and profits of the Sony Corporation.

Early years

Ken Kutaragi was born in Tokyo, Japan. His parents, although not wealthy by Japanese standards, still managed to own their own business, a small printing plant in the city. As Kutaragi grew into childhood, they actively encouraged the young boy to explore his mechanical abilities in the plant, and he worked after school there. Aside from his duties in his parents' factory, Kutaragi was a studious, high-level student; he was often described as a "straight A student."

Kutaragi always had the desire to "tinker", often taking apart toys as a child rather than playing with them. This curiosity carried from childhood, leading him as a teenager to learn the intricacies of electronics. Eventually, in fact, his love of electronics led to him enrolling in University of Electro-Communications, where he acquired an Electronics degree in the 1970's.

Immediately after graduation, Kutaragi began working for Sony in their digital research labs in the mid-1970's. Although at the time it was considered a radical decision, Kutaragi felt that Sony was on the "fast track". He quickly gained a reputation as an excellent problem solver and a forward thinking engineer, earning that reputation by working on many successful projects - including early liquid crystal displays (LCDs) and digital cameras.

Career

In the late 1980s, he was watching his daughter play a Famicom and realized the potential that existed within video games. At that particular time, Sony's executives had no interest in video games. Thus, when Nintendo expressed the need for a sound chip for its upcoming new 16-bit system, Kutaragi accepted the offer. Working in secret, he designed the chip, the SPC700. When they found out, Sony's executives were furious. Only with Sony CEO Norio Ohga's approval was Kutaragi able to complete the chip and keep his job.

Even while working with Nintendo, within Sony, gaming was still regarded as a fad. Despite this hostile atmosphere to video games, Kutaragi managed to persuade Norio Ohga into making two devices, a SNES add-on, the SNES-CD and a Sony branded console, which could play both SNES-CD games and Nintendo cartridges. These efforts resulted in a device called the "Play Station", a console that would be compatible with both Super Famicom games and software released on a new format called the SuperDisc. Eventually, the partnership between Sony and Nintendo faltered due to licensing disagreements, but Kutaragi and Sony continued to develop their own console. Kutaragi later recalled staying up all night working on the console design for several nights in a row "because our work was so interesting. Despite being considered a risky gamble by other Sony executives, Kutaragi once again had the support of Norio Ohga and several years later the company released the original PlayStation. The success of the PlayStation led to him heading up the development of more consoles like the PlayStation 2, and its successor, the PlayStation 3.

The commercial success of the PlayStation franchise makes Sony Computer Entertainment the most profitable business division of Sony. Despite being an upstart in the console market against veterans Nintendo and Sega, the first PlayStation displaced them both to become the most popular console of that era. The PlayStation 2 extended Sony's lead in the following generation, at one point holding a 65% market share with 100 million units shipped. Ken was recognized by many financial and technological publications for this success, most notably when he was named one of the 100 most influential people of 2004 in TIME magazine and the "Gutenberg of Video Games".

In 1997 Kutaragi was appointed CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America, and accordingly moved to California. Since 1997, Kutaragi had been favoured to become the next Sony president. He enjoyed a close relationship with Sony CEO Norio Ohga, who had backed Kutaragi on the Sound Chip and PlayStation projects. Ohga's successor Nobuyuki Idei promoted Kutaragi to Deputy Executive President, Sony-Global chief operating officer, and Vice-Chairman in 2003.

On November 30, 2006, Kutaragi was replaced as President of Sony Computer Entertainment by Kaz Hirai, the President of SCE America. In addition to other management changes, Kutaragi was promoted to chairman of SCEI, and retained his position as chief executive officer of the group. On April 26, 2007, it was announced that Kutaragi would retire and instead take up the role of Honorary Chairman. Taking over his position would be then SCEI president and CEO Kaz Hirai, who would eventually be promoted to president and CEO of Sony. On June 29, 2011, following the reshuffling of management, Sony announced that on June 28, 2011, Kutaragi had stepped down as honorary chairman of SCEI. Kutaragi relinquished active management of the business he created and built in 2007, when he stepped down as executive Chairman and Group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment. He has remained at Sony as senior technology advisor.

Ken Kutaragi later became president and CEO of Cyber AI Entertainment, Inc. He also serves on the boards of Kadokawa Group Holdings, Inc., Nojima Corporation, and Rakuten, Inc. In 2009, he became a visiting professor of Ritsumeikan University.

Assessment by industry analysts

Although Kutaragi's leadership of consumer electronics was not successful, analysts also suspect that outgoing Sony CEO Nobuyuki Idei had set up Kutaragi to fail, given that both men had a cool working relationship. Idei assigned Kutaragi the tedious task of turning around the consumer division which had already been falling behind competitors such as Samsung in the LCD market. Kutaragi's rival for the top position, Howard Stringer, was given the less difficult assignment of the content business and his success at Sony BMG Music Entertainment resulted in his promotion.

Sony Computer Entertainment, which Kutaragi had been heading since its inception, had a weaker year in 2004 after several years of solid growth. During that same year, Sony’s game sales fell to $7.5 billion from $8.2 billion, and its operating income slid to $650 million from $1 billion, losing $25 million in Q4 of 2004. This can be attributed partially to the over-saturation of the video game market and price wars which caused the PS2 to lose the top sales position for a time.

Seventh generation game consoles

Kutaragi has labelled the Xbox 360 as "just an Xbox 1.5" and stated that it was "only going after PlayStation 2". However, SCE Executive Tetsuhiko Yasuda did not consider Microsoft to be a competitor, and has said that they might consider working on games together. In September 2006 Kutaragi admitted that the shortage of PlayStation 3 consoles to North America and Japan as well as the postponing of the consoles debut in Europe put Sony's strength in hardware in decline.

Jai Ganesh · 2019-08-13 01:25:07

561) Konrad Zuse

Konrad Zuse 1910-1995 ( 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) is considered by many to be one of the founders of modern computing because of his work on early stage computers and computing languages.

Early Life

Konrad Zuse was born in 1910 in Berlin, Germany. His family moved to East Prussia shortly after he was born, and Zuse spent most of his life there. At a young age, Zuse showed talent in the arts and engineering, and went from making block prints and drawings to building model trains and railroads. As a boy he attended school in the town of Braunsberg, and received an education in the liberal arts. At 17, Zuse's interest in engineering led him to apply to the Berlin Technical School, where he studied the various facets of modern technical engineering. While at school, Zuse built a vending machine that dispensed food and drink, took money, and gave back exact change. However, during his studies Zuse was constantly frustrated at the numerous calculations involved in the processes of engineering. All of these calculations had to be written out and solved by hand.

Inspired to Create a Computing Machine

Zuse soon got a job at the Henschel Aircraft Company as an engineer, supervising the building of aircraft. One of his jobs was to inspect the wings of the plane, and see how much stress could be placed upon them before they would start to break apart. This job required many and diverse calculations that took up a lot of time. It was frustrating work, and Zuse spent many hours with his calculator and a pen. This inspired him to come up with the idea of a machine that would simplify the work involved in calculating advanced mathematics. However, building such a machine would not be simple. Zuse realized that he had to figure out a way for his machine to record and save the various steps involved in doing complex calculations. This required the calculation machine to be able to recognize and store various stages of the mathematical problem.

The Z1 computing machine

Zuse left his job at the aircraft company, and started to work on his invention. Using his parents' living room as a laboratory, he first figured out what his ideal machine would need. He envisioned an input device where he could define the various parts of the problem, a storage device for saving the various stages of the problem, and an arithmetical module that would work out all the steps of the equation. He would also need some way to link the various parts of the machine together, so they could operate as one. Zuse also planned to add a mechanical keyboard to his device, so he could input the various mathematical problems more efficiently.

With these ideas in mind, Zuse started to work on his project. He was a competent mechanic and draftsman, but his knowledge did not extend into the realm of electrical engineering, a discipline that would have helped him build the machine that he had envisioned. However, this did not dissuade him. Zuse was infinitely more familiar with the two-digit number system of binary arithmetic than he was with the 10-digit number system used by most calculating machines of the time, so Zuse decided that he would program his computing machine to run using binary code. It would be simpler to make a system dependent on only two numbers rather than to keep track of ten. Also, since anything could be expressed through binary code, this would give his machine greater versatility in figuring out complex equations. Zuse's final product consisted of a memory mechanism designed around moving pins in and out of slots, to represent zero or one. Another hidden benefit, Zuse realized, was that because his computing machine was only dealing with two digits, he could keep the space he needed to a minimum, and the resulting machine was very compact. The memory unit that he created took up about a cubic meter of space. Connected to a calculation unit, Zuse's first computing machine, the ZI, was completed around 1938.

Improvements Made to Computing Machines

Shortly after Zuse completed his first computing machine, one of his friends, Helmut Schreyer, who was also an electric engineer, suggested that Zuse replace the mechanical workings of his computing machine with vacuum tubes and telephone relay switches, to speed up the processing time and increase the efficiency of the machine. Zuse rejected the idea of using vacuum tubes, but he did incorporate the relay switches into his designs.

Zuse created the Z2 computing machine using the relay switches suggested by Schreyer. Built with the telephone relays, it was a bit more unstable than the older mechanical system, because the switches were not always reliable. However, by accommodating these new ideas, Zuse was stepping far ahead of his time, anticipating a future techology.

Zuse's work with these new forms of computation attracted the attention of the German Experimental Aircraft Institute. They had been working unsuccessfully to reduce the number of planes that broke apart during flight because of wear and tear at the wings. The Institute's job was to figure out how to overcome this problem, called fluttering. However, the Institute was not equipped to handle the vast number of calculations required to correct the problem. Zuse was contacted, and a deal was worked out where the Institute would give Zuse funding to build a better computing machine, while at the same time he assisted the Institute in building more wind-resistant planes. Zuse received the grant from the Institute and began working on the Z3, while still using his parents' living room as a base of operations. When it was finished, the Z3 could add, subtract, multiply, divide, and extract a square root. This could be done in a matter of seconds, since the number of relays that Zuse had been able to incorporate was much greater than his previous computing machines.

Innovated

Zuse's computing machines were ahead of their time in both size and portability. Zuse's Z3 took up only a closet's worth of space, and could be moved around at will. Zuse had also invented a push button control panel that allowed the user to input various commands. The device recognized conversion, and could convert decimal numbers into binary numbers and back again at the user's command.

Zuse was also the first person to come up with a programming language for his systems. He incorporated two unique symbols, which are used all the time today in mathematical calculations. They are greater than or equal to (≥) and less than or equal to (≤). Zuse was a technological pioneer even before such terms as hardware or software were commonplace.

World War II

Zuse was recruited by the Third Reich to create computing machines for their forces during World War II. His third computing machine, the Z3, was destroyed when an Allied bomb fell on the house where Zuse and his family lived. Zuse survived, however, and went on to create another computing machine called the S1, similar to the Z3 except that it was not programmable. The S1 computing machines were used to guide unmanned German gliders that carried bombs to targets. These gliders were directed to their targets via remote control, and used the S1 system designed by Zuse to adjust their wings and tail to flying conditions and to the movement of the intended target.

Near the end of the war, Zuse created the Z4, his most advanced system to date. Because his machine was portable, he was able to move it and keep the Allies from discovering and destroying it. He hid the computing machine in a University town by the name of Gottingen, and left it with the Experimental Aircraft Institute, the same institution that he had worked for during the War. His devices were not discovered until much later, when French troops discovered the hidden Z4.

After the French found his machine, word of the new technology spread throughout France and the United States. Members of the scientific community marveled at his computing machine, and they were amazed at how much he had accomplished without any knowledge of similar projects that were being developed at the same time.

Zuse's Later Life

After the war Zuse continued to experiment with computational devices. It took him a long time to release the information about his machines, because even after the war was over he distrusted the Allies and refused to answer their questions about his methods and computing machines.

Zuse soon learned about American scientists that had worked on technological developments during the War. Although the Americans had produced systems that were much larger than Zuse's had been, it was Zuse who brought the science of computing further than anyone had thought possible. He continued designing, and formed his own company, Zuse KG, that continued developing scientific computing systems.

Zuse is still thought to be the true father of modern computing, because of the advanced nature of his inventions.

Jai Ganesh · 2019-08-15 00:07:40

562) Irving Langmuir

Irving Langmuir, (born Jan. 31, 1881, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.—died Aug. 16, 1957, Falmouth, Mass.), American physical chemist who was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize for Chemistry “for his discoveries and investigations in surface chemistry.” He was the second American and the first industrial chemist to receive this honour. Besides surface chemistry, his scientific research, spanning more than 50 years, included chemical reactions, thermal effects, and electrical discharges in gases; atomic structure; surface phenomena in a vacuum; and atmospheric science.

Early Life And Education

Langmuir was the third of four sons of Charles Langmuir, an insurance executive, and Sadie Comings. Both of his parents were inveterate record keepers, and he developed this habit himself while still young. He attended schools in Brooklyn and Philadelphia, as well as Paris during his father’s three-year company assignment in Europe. Interested in chemistry, physics, and mathematics from his youth, Langmuir chose a major in metallurgical engineering at Columbia University in New York City because that curriculum, as he later said, “was strong in chemistry…had more physics than the chemical course, and more mathematics than the course in physics—and I wanted all three.”

After graduating from Columbia’s School of Mines in 1903, Langmuir studied with physical chemist Walther Nernst at the University of Göttingenin Germany. His dissertation focused on the dissociation of gases near a hot platinum wire, for which he received a doctorate in 1906. As a student, he was influenced not only by Nernst, who often sought practical applications of his fundamental research, but also by the mathematician Felix Klein, who advocated the use of mathematics as a tool and promoted the interaction between theoretical science and its practical applications. During his years in Germany, Langmuir frequented the mountains for skiing in the winter and for climbing in the summer. Such outdoor activities remained lifelong interests for him.

Finding A Career

After returning to the United States, Langmuir became an instructor at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., but he did not find his three years there particularly satisfying. His teaching duties left him little time for research, and he was not paid what he thought he was worth. He quickly realized that this was not the avenue to the scientific reputation and financial security that he sought.

In the summer of 1909, instead of a mountain climbing vacation, Langmuir worked at the General Electric Company’s research laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y. Enticed by the company’s commitment to fundamental research, the latitude given to the scientists working there, and the availability of equipment, Langmuir accepted an invitation to remain. At first he apparently intended to find another academic position, but he stayed at General Electric for the rest of his career, retiring in 1950 but continuing as a consultant until his death.

Major Research

Improving the early tungsten-filament incandescent light bulbs was one of the ongoing projects at the research lab in 1909. These high-vacuum bulbs had several drawbacks: their glass envelopes blackened over time, thus reducing their illumination, and the tungsten filaments were relatively short-lived. While other workers at the laboratory believed that a better vacuum would lengthen the bulbs’ lives, Langmuir began to investigate the behaviour of gases near a hot tungsten filament. The blackening of the bulbs, he discovered, resulted from the deposition of tungsten that evaporated from the hot filament, and an atmosphere of inert gas within the bulb—a mixture of nitrogen and argon worked best—reduced the problem. This, along with Langmuir’s development of an improved design for the tungsten filament, led to a much-improved and commercially successful incandescent bulb.

Among the gases that Langmuir studied was hydrogen. A hot tungsten filament rapidly cools in the presence of this gas, and he postulated the cause to be the dissociation of hydrogen molecules into atoms. When he later read about the heating caused by the recombination of hydrogen atoms into molecules at solid surfaces, he combined this with his earlier work to develop an atomic hydrogen welding torch, which generates high temperatures through the dissociation and subsequent recombination of hydrogen.

Langmuir’s study of gases near hot metal surfaces also led him to investigate thermionic emission—the ejection of electrons from a heated surface—and the behaviour of surfaces in a vacuum. These investigations resulted in theoretical advances in describing the spatial distribution of charge between a pair of electrodes and practical improvements to vacuum tubes, as well as the invention of a fast and efficient vacuum pump.

The largest body of Langmuir’s work involved the behaviour of molecules at solid and liquid surfaces. He laid the groundwork for his prize-winning work on surface chemistry as early as 1916–17 with important publications on the adsorption, condensation, and evaporation of gas molecules at solid surfaces and on the arrangements of molecules in the surface layers of liquids. These studies, like most of his investigations, showed his penchant for simple experimental designs coupled with extensive mathematical analysis. After 1932 Langmuir returned to his earlier interest in liquid surfaces and, together with his collaborators Katherine Blodgett and Vincent Schaefer, examined the monomolecular layers of various organic compounds on the surface of water. Blodgett developed a method for transferring such a monolayer to a solid surface, and the successive buildup of monolayers became known as a Langmuir-Blodgett film. This technique proved significant in later biophysical studies of the membranes of living cells.

Working independently of the American atomic chemist Gilbert N. Lewis, Langmuir formulated theories of atomic structure and chemical bond formation, known as the Lewis-Langmuir theory of molecular structure, and introduced the term covalence.

Meteorology Research

During World War II, Langmuir worked on the problem of airplane deicing at a station on the summit of Mount Washington, N.H. With Schaefer, he also investigated the production of particles of various sizes and their behaviour in the atmosphere and in filters. These studies led to improved methods for generating smokescreens by the military, as well as to his subsequent interest in weather modification by seeding clouds with small particles. Some of his experiments in seeding clouds preceded a heavy snowfall in Schenectady in the winter of 1946 and heavy rainfall near Albuquerque, N.M., on a day in July 1949 when no substantial rain was predicted. Whether there was any connection between the seeding and the subsequent precipitation, however, remained controversial.

Avocations And Awards

This excursion into experimental meteorology was part of Langmuir’s interest in “science out-of-doors,” which involved his close observation and explanation of many natural everyday phenomena. An avid outdoorsman, he enjoyed hiking, mountain climbing, skiing, swimming, and boating throughout much of his life. He learned to pilot a plane at age 49 and was a personal friend of Charles Lindbergh. He was also a friend of the musical conductor Leopold Stokowski, with whom he worked to improve the quality of radio broadcasts of orchestral music.

Langmuir was an ardent conservationist and an advocate for the control of atomic energy, as well as an unsuccessful candidate to Schenectady’s city council and an organizer of the Boy Scouts in that city. In 1912 he married Marion Mersereau of South Orange, N.J., and they adopted two children. He involved his family in many of his hobbies and outdoor activities. He died of a heart attack while vacationing at Cape Cod, Mass.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Langmuir was the recipient of numerous awards and more than a dozen honorary degrees. He served as president of both the American Chemical Society (1929) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1941). Since his death, a mountain in Alaska, a residential college of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the surface chemistry journal published by the American Chemical Society have been named for him. Described as the quintessential industrial researcher, Langmuir himself claimed that his accomplishments came from his working “for the fun of it.”

Jai Ganesh · 2019-08-17 00:38:59

563) Marcel Kiepach

Marcel Kiepach (February 12, 1894 - August 12, 1915) was a Croatian inventor. The works and inventions of this child prodigy belong to the areas of electronics, magnetism, acoustics, transmission of sound signals, and transformers.

Marcel was born in Križevci as a descendant of the noble family Kiepach, which came to Križevci in the early 19th century and became influential in the town. He studied economics in Berlin and electrical engineering in Charlottenburg.

In Berlin on March 16, 1910, as a boy of sixteen, Marcel patented a maritime compass that indicates north regardless of the presence of iron or magnetic forces. He patented an improved version in London on December 20, 1911. This second version was a remote maritime compass device, consisting of ampermeters as the indicating instruments located in different parts of the ship, resistant to magnetic forces or magnetic masses in their vicinity.

In France, he patented a dynamo for vehicle lighting. It was an electric generator combined with the mechanical drive of the vehicle itself. His "small transformer" for low voltage was widely implemented according to the "Kiepach-Weiland System". He also patented a power switch. He was active in various other areas of mechanics and electronics. He held correspondence with famous world scientists and inventors.

When World War I broke out, Kiepach volunteered. He died at the Russian front when he was 21. His remains were brought to Križevci in 1917, where they were laid in the family tomb in the Town Cemetery.

His two patents were included in the big exhibition Centuries of Natural Science in Croatia: Theory and Application (June–October 1996, Klovićevi Dvori Gallery). Prof. Vladimir Muljević lectured about his work at the 4th international symposium on new technologies 1993. Today, Križevci have the Marcel Kiepach Innovation Society. The town museum keeps many of his documents and family photographs. In 2004, Križevci held an exhibition about the Kiepach family.

Jai Ganesh · 2019-08-19 00:54:53

564) Johan Petter Johansson

Johan Petter Johansson (December 12, 1853 – August 25, 1943), sometimes known as JP, was a Swedish inventor and industrialist. He invented a modern adjustable spanner( patents in 1891 and 11 May 1892). He obtained over 100 patents in total.

He was born in Vårgårda in western Sweden, the oldest of six children in a crofter's family. His was first employed as an assistant operator of a steam engine at a local peat factory. He left Vårgårda at age 19, in 1873, for Motala to work as a navvy. Following militaryservice in 1874, he moved to Eskilstuna where he worked for the Bolinder-Munktell factory, and in 1878 he moved to Västerås where he found employment at a mechanical workshop. Following that, he worked as a blacksmith at a nearby farm.

At this time, he had made a decision to leave Sweden for the United States. This never happened; he was instead offered a more esteemed job by his former employer Munktells, and the offer changed his mind.

He eventually decided to start his own business and, in 1886, moved to Enköping where he started Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping) which quickly became a successful venture. It was during the years in his workshop that he invented the adjustable spanner and the plumber wrench. In 1890, B.A. Hjorth & Company agreed to distribute his tools worldwide under the "Bahco" trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

Johansson transferred the then-large enterprise to his son, Hannes Brynge, and the B.A. Hjorth & Company in 1916. He started experimenting with electrical armature and in 1919 opened a new factory, Triplex, which manufactured electrical pendulums and various devices.
He died 89 years old after having been productive for the most of his life.

Jai Ganesh · 2019-08-21 01:14:23

565) Percy Lavon Julian

As the inventor of synthetic cortisone, fire-extinguishing Aero-Foam, and drugs to treat glaucoma, Percy Lavon Julian (1899-1975) made life-enhancing and life-saving products more affordable. Despite facing racial prejudice and segregation at nearly every step of his career, Julian became the first African American to be named director of research at a white-owned firm, and he eventually founded his own Julian Laboratories and Julian Research Institute, where he continued as director until his death.

Percy Lavon Julian was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on April 11, 1899; his father was a railway mail clerk, and his grandfather had been a slave. He credited his strict father with providing the discipline and high standards necessary to his success. Reader's Digest reported that when as a young boy Julian proudly brought home a math test with a grade of 80, his father responded, "A son of mine must not be satisfied with mediocrity. After this make it 100!"

As a teenager, Julian moved with his family to Green-castle, Indiana, home of DePauw University. All six of the Julian children, including Percy, studied there. Although he was required to enter the university as a "sub-freshman, " in 1920 he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, as class valedictorian. He hoped to continue his education and become a research scientist in the field of organic chemistry, but his mentors dissuaded him. Although one of his chemistry professors made inquiries to graduate schools on Julian's behalf, they all replied negatively. "Discourage your bright young colored lad, " one school advised. "We couldn't get him a job when he was done, and it'll only mean frustration. Why don't you find him a teaching job in a Negro college in the South? He doesn't need a Ph.D. for that."

Despite his father's suggestion that he go into medicine, where he could be more independent, Julian persisted in chemistry. He went to Fisk University in Nashville, a school for African Americans, where he taught until 1923. The talent of his students encouraged him to pursue his own dream, and he applied for a research fellowship at Harvard. He earned his Master's degree in a year, finishing in the top group of his class. Had he been white, Harvard would have rewarded him with a post as a teaching assistant, but, as they explained to Julian, they feared that white students from the South would not accept him as a teacher. He stayed at Harvard on minor research fellowships, then returned to the South to teach at all-black schools West Virginia State College and Howard University, where after one year he was appointed head of the chemistry department.

Invented Drug for Glaucoma

Julian's research at Harvard served him well later. He had begun to repeat the experiments of the Austrian chemist Ernst Spth, who had learned to synthesize chemicals such as nicotine and ephedrine-rather than studying these compounds as they appeared in nature, Julian experimented on making these chemicals himself. With the financial backing of a wealthy Harvard classmate, he went to Vienna to study with Spth. Spth welcomed Julian into his household, initiating a father-son relationship and working closely together on synthesizing a variety of naturally occurring chemicals. Through his work with Spth, Julian received his Ph.D. at the University of Vienna in 1931. With his Ph.D., he returned to Howard, and then went again to DePauw, where he both taught and researched, but was denied the title of professor because of his race.

Although he would make one of his most important discoveries at this time, Julian's students remembered him as a committed teacher. Chemist J. Wayne Cole recalled in Ebony magazine, "He was obviously involved in his laboratory work but was essentially an instructor-first and foremost. It was the shaping of the student that appealed to him the most. And believe me, he never tolerated laziness or disinterestedness."

While carrying his teaching load, Julian pursued the problem of synthesizing physostigmine, a chemical known to help in the treatment of glaucoma. Despite years of effort, chemists had not been able to make the chemical in the laboratory. With fundraising help from his former professor Dean William Blanchard, Julian's research progressed rapidly and attracted international attention as he reported his findings in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. When he finally succeeded, he was universally acknowledged as leader in the field of chemistry. Dean Blanchard moved to appoint Julian as the head of DePauw's chemistry department, to make Julian the first professor of chemistry at any traditionally white university in America, and to make DePauw, as Reader's Digest reported, "a chemical Mecca." Blanchard's colleagues refused, calling the appointment "inadvisable."

Soybean Research Enabled More Innovations

With his academic career apparently at a dead-end, Julian received a timely invitation from Chicago's Glidden Company to direct soybean research. While there, he developed a process for isolating and preparing soya protein, which led to a number of important inventions. Among the most highly praised was his "bean soup, " commercially known as Aero-Foam, which the Navy used during wartime to put out fires; he also developed a soy protein for coating paper at a fraction of the cost of the previously used milk casein.

Even more important was his discovery of a technique by which he could mass-produce the hormones testosterone and progesterone. Testosterone was then touted as an anti-aging drug for men, while progesterone helped prevent spontaneous abortion in pregnant mothers. While these hormones were available in nature, they were difficult to get, with the supply limited to the brains and spines of cattle that had been slaughtered. Although German chemists had extracted hormones from soybean oil, the technique they used was expensive and could not provide them in commercial quantities. Julian discovered away to make the oil porous, enabling chemists to create mass quantities of the hormones.

The invention of Compound S, however, is considered Julian's biggest scientific achievement. Natural cortisone was a recognized treatment for rheumatoid arthritis and other illnesses causing muscle pain; to get it, however, the bile from nearly 15, 000 oxen would be required to treat a single patient for a year. The limited supply of cortisone made it impractical as a treatment option. Again using soybean oils, Julian created a drug-Compound S-that could mimic the effects of natural cortisone in the body. His synthesized cortisone resembled natural cortisone in every way, except that it lacked an oxygen atom in a crucial position. Because the body itself could replace that atom when the drug was used, the therapeutic result was the same. Julian's discovery made the benefits of cortisone economically feasible for all patients.

Racial Discrimination Did Not Deter Him

Julian patented these and nearly 130 other chemical innovations, enabling him to earn make a living much larger than that available to most blacks. In 1950, shortly after he had been named "Chicagoan of the Year" in a Chicago Sun-Times poll, Julian moved into the white, middle-class suburb of Oak Park, Illinois. He purchased an ornate, 15-room house and planned extensive landscaping and improvements, but even before he and his family moved in, they received threats and were the victims of an attempted arson. The water commissioner refused to turn on their water, until the family threatened to go to court. Julian was compelled to hire a private guard to patrol the property 24 hours a day. He told Time, "We've lived through these things all our lives. As far as the hurt to the spirit goes, we've become accustomed to that."

Julian continued to confront racism in his professional life as well. In 1951, when the Research Corporation of New York City invited Julian, along with 34 other scientists, to hear a talk at the Union League Club of Chicago, the club's manager contacted the organization and informed them that Julian would not be permitted to enter the building. The New York Times reported that the club's directors had issued "explicit instructions" forbidding Julian's attendance. By 1956, he had become more actively involved in opposing racial injustice. He became the first black man to chair the General Council of Congregational Christian Churches' Council for Social Action. The council voted to raise litigation funds for a delegate who had been refused admission to an American Legion Post, and, according to the New York Times, called on members to "support nonsegregated practices in selling, buying, and leasing property."

In 1967, Julian and North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company president Asa Spaulding organized a group of 47 wealthy business persons and professionals to raise money for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The group, calling itself the National Negro Business and Professional Committee for the Legal Defense Fund, announced in the New York Times, "This means the Negro millionaire is coming of age and taking a responsible place in the community." The committee planned to raise $1 million a year for cases involving voting rights, school desegregation, and job discrimination. Julian had been connected with the NAACP since 1947, when he won their Spingarn Medal Award.

Founded His Own Laboratories

Julian's financial success also enabled him to leave Glidden in 1953 and found Julian Laboratories. In addition to his suburban Chicago laboratory, he established subsidiaries in Mexico and Guatemala, which studied the possible medical benefits of the Mexican yam. These pharmaceutical businesses were so successful that eventually Julian, approaching his mid-60s, found the pressure to be too much, and in 1961 he sold them for nearly $2.4 million. In 1964, he retired as president from Julian Laboratories, then became director of Julian Research Institute and president of Julian Associates.

In 1974, Julian became increasingly ill, and was diagnosed with cancer of the liver. Despite a lack of energy and a difficult schedule of treatment, Julian continued to work and give speeches. In November of that year, he was honored by Sigma Xi, a society of research scientists, with the Procter Prize for extraordinary service to science and humanity. As Ebony reported, in his acceptance speech he discussed the benefits and drawbacks of scientific advancements: "Many of these successes have been abused, he acknowledged, while others have been the subjects of material applications having little implication for the enrichment of the spirit; man has treasured them as weapons or employed them as gadgets." Despite this, he said, he "shares the humanistic faith in an ordered, purposeful and meaningful reality."

Shortly before his death, Julian announced that he was satisfied with his life's work. "I have had one goal in my life, " he said, "that of playing some role in making life a little easier for the persons who come after me." He died in April of 1975. In addition to many academic honors and citations he received during his lifetime, he was honored in 1993 by the U.S. Postal Service with a postage stamp in the Black Heritage Series. He was also honored by the city of Oak Park, Illinois, which named a middle school after one of its first residents.

Died: 19 April 1975, Waukegan, Illinois, United States.

Jai Ganesh · 2019-08-23 00:00:16

566) Carl Gustaf Patrik de Laval

Carl Gustaf Patrik de Laval, (born May 9, 1845, Blasenborg, Swed.—died Feb. 2, 1913, Stockholm), Swedish scientist, engineer, and inventor who pioneered in the development of high-speed turbines.

After 1872 he was an engineer with the Klosters-Bruck Steel Works. In 1878 he invented the centrifugal cream separator, and later he applied the principle of rotation to the manufacture of glass bottles.

Laval built his first impulse steam turbine in 1882. Further advances followed, and in 1893 he built and operated a reversible turbine for marine use. A Laval reaction turbine (patented in 1883) attained a speed of 42,000 revolutions per minute. He continued improving his turbine until by 1896 he was operating a complete power plant using an initial steam pressure of 3,400 pounds per square inch. He invented and developed the divergent nozzle used to deliver steam to the turbine blades. His flexible shaft, used to eliminate wobbling, which can be dangerous at high speeds, and his special double-helical gear formed the foundation for most steam-turbine development that followed.

Math Is Fun Forum

#576 2019-07-05 00:14:27

Re: crème de la crème

#577 2019-07-07 01:11:43

Re: crème de la crème

#578 2019-07-09 01:36:14

Re: crème de la crème

#579 2019-07-11 01:20:09

Re: crème de la crème

#580 2019-07-14 00:34:06

Re: crème de la crème

#581 2019-07-16 01:15:14

Re: crème de la crème

#582 2019-07-18 01:15:22

Re: crème de la crème

#583 2019-07-20 00:01:56

Re: crème de la crème

#584 2019-07-22 00:04:56

Re: crème de la crème

#585 2019-07-24 01:52:02

Re: crème de la crème

#586 2019-07-26 00:01:34

Re: crème de la crème

#587 2019-07-28 00:11:36

Re: crème de la crème

#588 2019-07-30 00:31:24

Re: crème de la crème

#589 2019-08-01 03:03:00

Re: crème de la crème

#590 2019-08-03 00:07:51

Re: crème de la crème

#591 2019-08-05 00:26:44

Re: crème de la crème

#592 2019-08-07 00:02:14

Re: crème de la crème

#593 2019-08-09 00:21:49

Re: crème de la crème

#594 2019-08-11 00:19:37

Re: crème de la crème

#595 2019-08-13 01:25:07

Re: crème de la crème

#596 2019-08-15 00:07:40

Re: crème de la crème

#597 2019-08-17 00:38:59

Re: crème de la crème

#598 2019-08-19 00:54:53

Re: crème de la crème

#599 2019-08-21 01:14:23

Re: crème de la crème

#600 2019-08-23 00:00:16

Re: crème de la crème

Board footer